


Grey Mare

by Arazsya



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Sleep Deprivation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 11:17:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21252527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arazsya/pseuds/Arazsya
Summary: Statement of Gwen Rhys, regarding a series of nocturnal visits. Original statement given 9th December 2008. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.





	Grey Mare

**Author's Note:**

  * For [crystalrequiem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crystalrequiem/gifts).

> Hope you enjoy! Fic is inspired by a Welsh wassailing tradition.

Statement of Gwen Rhys, regarding a series of nocturnal visits. Original statement given 9th December 2008. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

I don't know why you've put me in here, or given me this. I need to talk to someone, all right? I need your _help_. You're supposed to know about this stuff, right? How to stop it? That’s what I need. I don't need a bloody _form_. Unless it’s some sort of, I don’t know, protective incantation in a dead language, paperwork is not going to get me out of this.

Maybe you're just screening? Trying to get the people with the more ridiculous, obviously fake stories out – though based on what I've heard about that leak, you didn’t seem to care about that back then, at least. You've taken stories far more ridiculous than mine. I guess if this is the procedure I'll have to follow it – maybe there'll be someone I can talk to later? Please. I really need this. I don't think I can carry on much longer.

It started a few days ago – is that more recent than you normally get? Do people tend to stew in it for a while? Can I be marked urgent? But yeah. Few days ago. Early December. All the fancy decorations have been out since November, peace and goodwill towards all men or whatever. I figure it’s some kind of effort to distract from how quiet it all is, this time of year. It’s cold and bleak and full of dead things, out there, and so we’ve all apparently got to sing some carols and pretend we’re still warm from it. To be honest, where I live, it's like sticking fairy lights on a dustbin. Just rows and rows of terraced housing that’s barely up from student accommodation, all packed in so close together that you can get some real hatred going with your neighbours over the smallest things. I’ve never been on the best of terms with mine. I think it might be something left over from the last occupant, and the bad feeling’s sunk into the stonework, so all who shall ever live there will be treated as though it was them who had, I don’t know, never cleaned up after that split bin bag in 1998.

I thought that maybe that was why they didn’t do anything? I was so sure they must have heard what happened. The walls aren’t that thick, and I’ve always been able to pick out every line of next door’s arguments. But maybe they just weren’t aware of it anyway. No one else seems to be.

The thing first came to call in early evening – it was dark already, and bitterly cold. I was upstairs trying to get the heating on so that I wouldn’t freeze, but I’d forgotten to change the clock on the controls and it was being very stubborn about the whole thing. I eventually managed to get the pipes whining, but as I was backing out of the cupboard I heard this knocking at the door.

It’s not something I get very often – like I said, I don’t get on with the neighbours, and my friends tend to text if they’re in the area. I get the post in the morning from time to time, but never at this hour. I thought it might be that, though – I was expecting a gift for someone that I’d spent ages picking out, wanted to be perfect, and the mail sometimes gets left with next door if I’m out. They don’t usually bring it round, if they can wedge it in the letter box or leave it tucked behind the bins, but maybe they’d noticed the price on the import slip, and their Christmas spirit had started to have an effect.

But opening the door in the middle of the night still isn’t something I do. It’s stupid. So I went to the upstairs bedroom, edged slowly towards the window, and peered out.

It wasn't one of my neighbours, unless they were on their way to a fancy dress party. At first it was just a vague blob of white, splotched over my step like a lens flare in a photograph, and then the breeze caught at it, and the loose cloth rippled into focus. My first instinct was a trick-or-treater, and I cursed myself for having forgotten to get them anything, before I remembered that had been over a month ago.

It was tall – would have had to stoop to actually get through my door, and the way that the sheet seemed to hang off it, I would have said it was thin, too. There wasn’t any sum that I could do with that appearance that would make it make sense – it wasn’t in proportion, I couldn’t see any limbs, even when I tried to look for feet at the bottom. There was just a smooth pool of cloth against the paving.

I'd already decided the door was staying shut, and was about to lean away when it moved. A face snapped up towards me, and I was in no doubt that it was looking right at me, though there were no eyes left in that head. It was a skull, broad and bleached, and the teeth were bared in a wide, mocking smile. It wasn't human – too big, too long. It might have been a horse, but it's not like I'm an expert in dead farm animals, is it?

I knew it saw me, though, and when it did, that awful lower jaw dropped even further, and it started to speak. I didn't feel like it was shouting – there was nothing violent about it – but I could still hear it clearly, all the same. The only issue was understanding it. I think it was in Welsh, but I’d forgotten all that I’d ever learned of that, just a sticky mess of consonants and vowels in the back of my head. There was something about eating in there, and something about the door, but it was fluent-fast and I couldn’t get anything else.

I blinked at it, and spent a little too long wondering where that voice could possibly have come from. There was no throat that I could see, no flesh, just the skull and the sheet, bright and eerie in the cold blue glow of the new energy-efficient streetlamps.

Then it started singing. It wasn't in Welsh anymore – wasn't in any language I recognised, or would ever be able to recognise. It was more something that you'd hear over the ocean or in the wind around the walls in winter, and it pulled a chill through me that the slowly warming radiators couldn’t touch. It went on like that, for almost a full minute, and then it drew to a close, like the world had pulled all sound back into it. And then it kept looking at me.

I wanted to lean further back into the house, out of sight. I wanted to rush down, check the door was as locked as I thought it was, pull the sofa in front of it, barricade myself in, but all it felt like I could do was stand there and watch.

The thing with the skull twitched, a dance of sheet, and it was like a long, spindling leg that I couldn't see brought it a step closer to my door. Then there was another, and I knew in that moment that it was going to come in. That all the locks in the world didn't factor into the laws of its universe. That it was going to come inside, and it was going to eat, and it would leave me with the colour of my bones a match for its. Empty and gone and oblivious to the investigation that would come after.

I cried out, without meaning to. Not with any words – just a high, shocked note, trembling and reedy, and it stopped moving. Its head slowly tilted back up towards me, and that fixed horse’s grimace looked almost approving.

I shouted for it to go away, quavering and unconvincing. I didn't believe for a second it’d actually listen – I hoped one of the neighbours would hear, interfere. I almost threatened to call the police, but I knew there was nothing under that sheet that they'd be able to put handcuffs on, and even then I didn’t want to feel like I was wasting their time.

The creature waited for a beat, and then it started to sing again, for about as long as I’d been speaking for, and then it stopped again. Waited, and when I did nothing, lurched towards the door again.

I sang back. I'm not sure what it was, if it was even relevant – it might have just been whatever the radio had been playing most, which was probably some sickly Christmas pop song. It was one I knew, though, and I made it to the end of the tune, my heart hammering in my chest at completely the wrong rhythm. The whole time that I sang, the monster didn't move. It just stood there and listened.

I ran out of notes, though, and it started up that strange sound again, a faint rending and wailing, like a ship going down in the sea two miles away.

It went on like that, for the rest of the night. It'd sing, and I'd sing back, my head a wild mess of panic, expecting every moment for my mind to reach for another lyric only to find that I didn't remember the next one, and then the thing would come inside and I would die. I could hear my death in its song, that I wouldn’t hear it anymore, and it hurt.

The whole thing kept me more awake than coffee ever has. When the sun started to rise, a faint orangey glow over the terraces, the thing just turned around and started to move away, still with that odd, lurching gait. I meant to keep an eye on it, watch it all the way out of sight, but I lost it somewhere between blinking, and I didn’t want to chase after it.

The sky slowly turned that midwinter white, and I just sort of went about my day. There wasn’t time to sleep before work, but I did manage a quick, timed nap on the bus. Still felt awful. I must have decided I’d dreamed it, and that I’d slept fine after all, for all that my aching head that day should have proven otherwise. I fell asleep on the sofa watching a documentary about a subject I didn’t care for, and when I woke up it was at the window, barely inches away from me. Already singing, the line of its skull tilted down against the pane. The glass was humming, too, in tune with it. I was halfway across the room before I was fully awake.

The whole nightmare just played around again, only this time, I think the sounds of it were different. It was softer, more sonorous. Low enough to reverberate off the house, and it just made me feel the weight of my own body more. I sat there on the floor and tried to sing back at it when it stopped, and every time I paused, trying to find more lyrics in a treacle-thick mind, it would move closer, and I would wonder what it would feel like. The music was beautiful, and if that would be the last thing I heard before, then that might be any worse than anything else. I was still scared, my throat dry and aching with it, croaking through struggled verses, but it’s all just time. Whether now or later, my death was coming, and it would feel the same.

I couldn’t stop singing, though, for all that I could feel my brain starting to slump with every note of its melody. And then I didn’t go to work. Didn’t even call in sick. I just slept for two hours, then packed a bag, phoned my parents and told them I needed to come home for a few days. They were worried, but otherwise fine with it, and I hoped I’d just be able to wait it out long enough for it to lose interest. I started looking for night shift jobs, like if I just wasn’t there when it was I’d be safe.

It hasn’t helped. I think I saw it yesterday, when I was trying to do the food shopping for the family. Just for an instant, something tall and billowing in the centre of a crowd that I hoped was just a street performer, but I know I saw that exposed-tooth smile. My parents are going away soon. I don’t think it’s going to leave me alone. Please, will you just let me talk to someone?

Statement ends.


End file.
